Remembering Don D. Roberts (1932–2024) and Beverley E. Kent (1934–2024)

don d. roberts and beverley e. kent departed life eleven days apart. Don died on 4 March; Beverley on 15 March. They had married late in life and lived together for over twenty-five years in retirement in a house they had designed and built on Vancouver Island near Victoria, British Columbia.Don was born in Des Moines, Iowa, but grew up in Chicago and attended Roosevelt University. In 1958, he received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Illinois with a thesis on Kierkegaard's dialectic of communication, and in 1963, he received his PhD with a dissertation on Peirce's existential graphs. At Illinois, Max Fisch became Don's mentor. Don was a member of a small group, led by Max, which spent months at Harvard preparing Peirce's manuscripts for electro-printing as the first stage of what became the Peirce Edition Project. After a short stint teaching philosophy at Colorado State University, Don joined the philosophy Department at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he remained for the remainder of his career. He was an inaugural editor for the Peirce Project's chronological edition, and for nearly two decades, he directed a branch of the project at Waterloo. Don was a much-admired teacher; among his signature courses were his courses on Peirce's Pragmatism and his logic courses based on Peirce's existential graphs. His most important work is his 1973 book The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, which brought Peirce's existential graphs (EG) into respectability during a time when the Frege-Russell logic program was overwhelmingly dominant. His book was followed by later papers further developing EG and on other Peircean themes, including an early paper on Peirce's much-debated proof of Pragmatism. Don was an avid chess player and a jazz enthusiast and pianist. He took seriously David Hume's advice to not let one's philosophical zeal and devotion overwhelm one's humanity.Beverley E. Kent, born in Wairoa, New Zealand, received her Doctorate at the University of Waterloo. She taught at universities in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States before eventually settling at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Beverley's most important work is her oft-cited 1987 book Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences, which was followed by publications on Peirce's esthetics, objective logic, and diagrammatic thought, among other topics. Aesthetic appreciation was of much importance for Beverley, and she devoted much time to painting and writing poems—and to composing haikus for special family occasions. She loved the natural environs surrounding her and Don's home on Vancouver Island.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.